


Out here in the perimeter, there are no stars

by rosa_himmelblau



Series: The Roadhouse Blues [22]
Category: Wiseguy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:07:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26084683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_himmelblau/pseuds/rosa_himmelblau
Summary: When you're drowning, you cling to whatever floats by.
Series: The Roadhouse Blues [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1069713





	Out here in the perimeter, there are no stars

You knew there was something wrong with your life if you got the idea you could use a Stephen King novel as a self-help book.

But Vinnie hardly needed that to know that if there wasn't precisely something wrong with his life, there was certainly something abnormal about it.

He had known that the book wasn't about a real gunslinger; Stephen King didn't write that kind of book. Sonny had probably known it, too, since he took one look at the cover when Vinnie bought it, looked away, and never said a word about it, and Vinnie was pretty sure that if Sonny had thought it was about a real gunslinger—Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, one of those guys—Sonny would have been very interested.

But it was OK with Vinnie that the book wasn't about a real gunslinger; cowboys were Sonny's thing, not his. In fact, the gunslinger, Roland, seemed to be more of a knight of the Round Table than a gunslinger, only one who carried a six-shooter. It was an interesting idea, anyway. Vinnie didn't really care, he just needed something to read. You could only count so many license plates before your brain started to bleed.

It would have to have been a real gunslinger—a real person—for Sonny to be interested because Sonny didn't read fiction. It didn't interest him. Sonny read about what was going on in the real world, and occasionally about what **had** gone on. But make-believe? That was for the movies.

Vinnie used to like to read about what was going on in the real world, too, had liked to keep up, but since he'd been dragged out of the real world, and never really come back to it, the only part of it that interested him was where he'd be sleeping that night and what he'd be having for dinner. Oh, and the rising gas prices, those interested him, even though Sonny bought the gas. His interest in everything else had waned.

It was just as well that Sonny hadn't asked him about the book, since Vinnie really didn't want to try to explain that it was based on T. S. Eliot's _The Waste Land,_ which was, in turn, based on Robert Browning's _Childe Roland To the Dark Tower Came._ He could imagine the look Sonny would give him, and the length of time Sonny would laugh at him. And the thing was, Vinnie agreed. Why would anybody want to read something like this? _Because the purple cover caught my eye. Because there are just times when it's better to be outside your head than inside it. Because nothing that happens to the guy in this book is ever going to be anything like my life. Because Stephen King's sledgehammer writing style doesn't require any more from the reader than that he open his eyes and focus on the page in front of him._ He didn't think Sonny would understand any of that, either.

Not that Sonny ever had any problem getting out of his head. He had this whole vicarious life going on, and yet Vinnie had the idea that he had no awareness of it. It bordered on empathy, but wasn't quite. Vinnie didn't have a word for it, but since he wasn't planning on writing a novel about it, he didn't really need one.

Suffice it to say, Sonny had no need of escapist fare. Sonny looked at the whole world as though it was his personal movie theatre, as though all the people were there to entertain him, and he watched their lives unfold like it was one long movie. Sitting in a restaurant, watching a couple on the street who appeared to be breaking up, Sonny would supply the dialogue. "Whaddaya mean, you're leaving? I just paid for your nose job!"

"Yeah, well, I found somebody richer. And smarter."

Vinnie tried very hard not to laugh during these—monologues? Dialogues?—because it was so obvious Sonny had no idea he was doing this. And if Vinnie drew his attention to it? Oh, yeah. It wouldn't go well. And worse than that, it might stop.

When the whole world was your movie screen, how could you possibly want to escape?

It was the same reason Sonny was always saying things that Vinnie didn't think made any sense, like telling Vinnie their waitress had a thing for him—for some reason it was always Vinnie they had a thing for. Or the guy in the car next to them at the stoplight was leaving his wife, or the salesgirl had just gotten engaged—even when there was no ring on her hand. They sounded like intuitive leaps, but Vinnie had the feeling they were more along the line of filling in the narrative blanks. The whole world was one big story, and when Sonny was bored, he'd start telling parts of it.

Vinnie found it entertaining, but he still needed something more private, something for those times Sonny wasn't talking to him, or he wasn't talking to Sonny, or Sonny was just asleep, or away. So Vinnie started hitting the used book stores wherever they stopped, usually picking up something big and fat and escapist-looking, though every once in a while he'd get one of the books he was supposed to have read in school—the ones he'd cheated off Mooch to bluff his way through a test, or Cliff's Notes'd his way through in college. He read some Kafka, which was a bad idea, and some Camus, which was even worse—they made the shadows in his imagination darker, and somehow more solid, filled with thoughts Vinnie really didn't want to have.

So he gave up on—Existentialists? Was that what they were?—and moved on to _Robinson Crusoe_ and _Jude, the Obscure_ and _Les Miserables,_ and he even plowed through _Moby-Dick._ And while Sonny wouldn't have been caught dead even opening one of them, he never made a crack about Vinnie reading them. Well, except for _Moby-Dick,_ but that was to be expected. That Vinnie was smart was one of the things Sonny liked about him. After all, part of Vinnie's function was to know the stuff Sonny didn't, sort of like his own private reference source. He could almost imagine Sonny, back in the old days, bragging about him reading Kafka. It would have been safe to do that, because anybody could see Vinnie was no bookworm, that he could take care of himself.

Vinnie didn't know, when he started The Gunslinger, if he'd realized that it was part of a continuing story, nor did he know whether, if he'd known, he'd have started it anyway. He liked the book well enough. He'd finished it, then he'd given it away, the way he did all the others, left it in a Goodwill drop box and hadn't thought any more about it until he was in another used book store and found the next book, _The Drawing of the Three._

That one was a little more interesting, maybe because he could relate to it better, since some of it took place in New York. He read those parts several times, until he finally gave that book away, too.

It wasn't until he got to the third book, _The Waste Lands,_ that Vinnie found something that made him want not just to read the book again and again, but to keep it.

In the first book there had been a boy, Jake, who had been murdered, which was how he came to meet Roland (and it was exactly that kind of thing that made Vinnie really grateful for Sonny's lack of curiosity. "He died, and that's how he met this guy?" Yeah. Never mind). In the second book, Roland prevented the murder from happening. And in the third book, Jake and Roland each seemed to be having something along the lines of a psychotic break, because Roland remembered the boy, and not just from when he'd saved his life. He remembered him from earlier, when he had first met him, and then let him die a second time in his own world. And Jake remembered that, too.

Vinnie read and reread these sections, Roland trying to convince his friends he had talked about Jake—which of course they didn't remember—since Jake hadn't died, Roland hadn't met him so he couldn't have talked about him (except that he had)—and Jake trying to find his way back through a door he had gone through when he was dead—

_When he was dead?_

_Yes, when he was dead._

It was as though this book was the Rosetta Stone to Vinnie's life, something that would help him decode it, to understand how it was possible to remember things that hadn't happened. Not that he didn't understand it, it was just—he didn't know how to make it match up in his mind. It wasn't an explanation he was looking for, really, it was an untangling—and one a little less drastic than the solution to the Gordian Knot.

So every morning after Sonny punched him awake in the gym, Vinnie went over the facts of his life, trying to sort them out and keep them sorted. What did he know for sure?

That he and Sonny had taken off in the middle of the night in a stolen car—

No. It wasn't stolen. It was Vinnie's car, sold by Frank and bought back by   
Sonny, whose reasoning was apparently if you were trying to snap a guy back to reality, giving him his car to drive was the way to do it. Vinnie had to admit, it had worked pretty well.

But the fact that what Vinnie "remembered" was Sonny stealing his car back for him was exactly the problem. It was one of his false memories. Although "false memories" was probably not the right term—it wasn't like those people who got convinced by their psychiatrists they'd been abused when they were kids. These were more like . . . untrue memories. Sonny sometimes had to be reminded that Vinnie had not, in fact, sold him out to Patrice (which meant reminding him he'd been a cop, which wasn't exactly better). Vinnie had yet to come up with a good way of saying, "No, I didn't betray you this way, I betrayed you that way." Mostly he tried not to talk about it at all. And Sonny never really seemed to forget Vinnie had been a cop, but he still seemed to believe the sell-out had been to Patrice, which was puzzling, but that could be applied to a lot of Sonny. Vinnie had his own tangles to straighten out; he wasn't going to apply himself to untangling Sonny, too.

Sonny also had a stubborn belief that Vinnie was the one who had locked the theatre doors, and he sometimes got confused about who had chased whom. Vinnie picked up these bits and pieces from conversations they'd had, by not correcting Sonny no matter what he said.

Sonny had also apparently fantasized about trying to take Vinnie's head off with a golf club, one of the ones stowed in the trunk of the car he'd stolen. (He really had stolen that one. Maybe that was why Vinnie's brain kept insisting he'd stolen the Charger.)

No, they weren't false memories in the traditional sense, and certainly not parallel universe or time travel problems, but more like . . . mistakes that had solidified into something that seemed more real than reality.

In one of the used book stores, Vinnie found a book that talked about the memory and how it worked. The most significant thing he learned was that the part of the brain that makes memories is the same part that imagines things, that memory is supplemented by imagination. He'd already known that while eyewitness testimony is the most persuasive thing a jury can hear, it's also the least reliable, and now he knew why.

Sonny must have really wanted to bash my head in with that golf club. He must have imagined it so hard, his mind added it to his memories.

Most of Vinnie's memory problems were different.

He and Frank had made one mistake, and from there their whole lives—all three of them—had taken a different path. Who would Vinnie have become, if he had testified against Sonny instead of watching him being lowered into the ground?

And without Frank's lying to him to save his soul—"In spite of the money, and the women, and the power, you did the right thing. A lot of guys we work for, and with, they would have caved into the seduction. I don't know that I wouldn't've myself." The idea that Frank could be corrupted by flashy women and bags of cash was laughable, but if Frank had never told that lie, what would have happened?

Vinnie couldn't imagine.

All his life from that moment on was built on two lies, one accidental and one deliberate.

Now, living under a name that wasn't his, he was trying to build a life based on the truth. 

And what was the truth? These years with Sonny? They moved constantly, staying not in hotels—not very often—but in furnished apartments or small, rented houses, slowly acquiring a few permanent possessions: Sonny's computer, and the stereo Vinnie had given away after their last big fight about it—and which Sonny had replaced without a word. A small collection of tapes, three seascapes Sonny had found and fallen in love with in a gallery somewhere near Cleveland, and a couple of shoeboxes full of knick-knacks. 

Sometimes they had to buy bigger stuff—Sonny usually insisted on new mattresses—but those they left behind. Somewhere in California Sonny had left behind a life, but he seemed in no hurry to return to it, and he never talked about it.

When, Vinnie wondered, had he figured out they were not just in hiding, but on the run? The second time they'd moved after just a couple of months? The third?

Their stays in the medium-sized cities Sonny chose grew longer, though apparently Sonny's conversations with Rudy grew no warmer. Why didn't Vinnie talk to Rudy himself? What was there to say? "Thanks for finding Sonny for me, don't tell my mother?"

And more than not having anything to say to Rudy, Vinnie didn't want to hear anything he might have to say.

So, they travelled.

Sonny bought Vinnie clothes—which at first he really needed because he'd gone off without anything more than he was wearing, and then later he needed because he kept gaining weight, or because the weather would change. Sonny's love of nice clothes had changed rather than disappeared; he bought himself soft, hand-knit sweaters and comfortable, expensive jeans. Except for presents, he didn't pick out Vinnie's clothes, but he did pay for them, and there was a funny reoccurring phenomenon regarding them: anything Sonny didn't like would get lost on its trip to the laundry, or mysteriously vanish when they moved, in spite of Vinnie's very careful packing.

Sonny always expressed unhappy surprise at these disappearances—and he did it with a straight face. Vinnie thought about saying something, but Sonny would either deny everything or admit it with one of those "Yeah, so, what's the problem?" looks, and then what?

And how much did Vinnie really care, anyway?

He probably should have cared, but he never did. There were moments when he resented Sonny's telling him what to do, when it made the anger fueling his depression flare to something vicious and uncontrollable. But mostly the depression made him sluggish, and Sonny's kick-in-the-pants attitude might have pissed Vinnie off, but he also recognized it as something he needed.

The first place they stayed was Nebraska, where Sonny dragged him out every morning for a workout, then to wander around. Vinnie still wasn't a hundred percent sure if Sonny was really there or if Norfolk, Nebraska, was on the map in purgatory, but he kept that to himself.

It took nearly a week and a lot of bruises for him to fully accept it was real, they were really in Nebraska, and Sonny was real.

Real and alive.

After Nebraska came Kansas, where Sonny bought him the stereo and a larger size jeans.

He was getting his weight back, and he occasionally felt like going out by himself, just to drive or walk or whatever. Sonny didn't like it.

He didn't say so, but he didn't, and Vinnie had to force himself not to capitulate to the unspoken message Sonny shouted at him every time he walked out the door. He went out, and he came back, and things got better, except they both remembered things that hadn't happened.

So it was good to have this to read, to help him try to make sense out of his persistent belief in the time when Sonny was dead, rather than the reality of the time during which I thought Sonny was dead. He couldn't talk about it with Sonny, he couldn't keep talking about how Sonny had tried to kill himself because of something Vinnie had done, or something he was, or even just because there were guys outside the door who had come to arrest him—they'd been Vinnie's guys, after all, Vinnie couldn't distance himself from it all. He couldn't keep dredging that up and hoping that Sonny wouldn't decide that being on the lam with the guy responsible for all that was maybe not the best use of his time.

Vinnie sometimes wondered if he maybe didn't think about Sonny too much. That question inevitably led to a second question: what the hell else am I supposed to be thinking about? That there's nobody else in my life? Frank's far away. Roger's a ghost. My mother thinks I'm dead. I can't even remember the name of the last woman I slept with—though I bet Sonny could tell me. He could change any of these things, maybe—all of them, maybe—but what kind of havoc would that wreak, and even if he didn't care about the people involved, it'd wreak havoc for him, too.

Sometimes he wondered what would happen if he got up one bright morning and told Sonny, "I'm going home. Not that this hasn't been **just swell,** but I   
really need to get out of here, because you're crazy, and I'm pretty sure I am, too, and I'm not sure it's a good thing that we're together. So, so long and thanks for everything."

Would Sonny let him go? It was a good question, but he didn't have an answer to it. He suspected there would be a fight, but this was based on the fact that there was almost always a fight. The sad, strange, ridiculous, hilarious truth of it was that they could end up in a fight over whether or not Vinnie was going to have waffles for breakfast. Punching, more than talking, was how they communicated. 

But even if Sonny let him go—maybe **especially** if Sonny let him go—would he? How far, and for how long? Would he walk down to the lobby of the latest hotel or apartment, down the corner from the latest rental house, and just stand there like a kid who's running away from home, only he's not allowed to cross the street?

Some things it was better not to know.

Vinnie held onto this third book, but he didn't look for any more in the series, wasn't even sure if King had continued it. Vinnie wasn't that interested in finding out what happened with the dark tower, or even with Roland and Jake, once they got their confusion straightened out. He wasn't on a quest, and if Sonny was— Well, Vinnie was quite sure that if Sonny was looking for a dark tower—or a tower of any kind—it would be for the view at the top. No mystical interpretations need apply.


End file.
